Portuguese is mother tongue of 215 million people, and has over 250 million total speakers. It’s the sole official language of Portugal, Brazil, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Angola, and São Tomé and Príncipe. It also has co-official language status in East Timor, Equatorial Guinea and Macau. As the result of expansion during colonial times, a cultural presence of Portuguese and Portuguese creole speakers are also found in Goa, Daman and Diu in India;] in Batticaloa on the east coast of Sri Lanka; in the Indonesian island of Flores; and in Malacca in Malaysia. This makes Portuguese the sixth most natively sopken language in the world.
A lot of native speakers of Portuguese don’t have a good level of English (or don’t speak it at all), so if you’d like to travel to one of these places, it’s a good idea to learn some Protuguese before. Good news are that Portuguese is one of the easiest languages to learn for English speakers. It has a lot of similarities with Spanish and other Latin languages, so if you already master one of them, it’ll be easier for you to learn Portuguese. Let’s explore now the most challenging issues of Portuguese grammar.
As it happens with all Romance languages (the ones that come from Latin, such as Spanish, French or Italian), the most challenging things for an English speaker are the same (and de ones that different it from English): Gender and Verb Conjugation
Gender
In portuguese, all sustantives have a gender, even the objects: they can be either masculine or femenine. So “mesa” (table) is femenine, while “pao” (bread) masculine. The article and adjectives that go with the sustantive must agree in gender and number, so “the table” would be “a mesa”, and “the bread” would be “o pao”. A lot of words share the gender with Spanish, French or Italian, has they have the same root or origin, so once you master gender in one of them, it gets easier for you to learn the other.
Number
As in English, plural is formed by adding an “s” (or “es”, depending on ther termination of the word).
Verb Conjugation
As all the other romance languages, verb tense and person is expressed by changing the termination of the root of the verb; that is, conjugating it. Verb conjugation can be challenging at the beginning for a native English, as English language doesn’t conjugate verbs. But, with some practice, it will get authomatical.
Conjugation en Portuguese is not very different from Spanish: “I speak, you speak, he/she speaks” would be “eu falo, tu falas, ele/ela fala”. “I’ll speak” would be “eu falarei” and “I spoke” would be “eu falei”.
Don’t try to memorize these rules, just practice! The point of explaining you this is help you choose the easiest language to learn for you, by knowing its main challenges before starting